The Mother's Wonder

“Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us t” — LUKE ii. 48.

mother of Jesus is the speaker, and it is of JL. Jesus that she asks her question. On the way home from the temple at Jerusalem, where they had gone to worship, you remember, they missed the child Jesus from their company. On going back they found him in the temple, “sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions.’* Then it was that His mother said unto him, 14 Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold thy fa ther and I have sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business?”

“Why hast thou dealt thus with us?” It is a puzzled question. The boy, who had been an obedient child in her household, whom she had cared for in her own way and found always docile to her guidance, had suddenly past beyond her and done a tiling -h she could not understand. It seemed as if she had lost him. Her tone is full of love, but there is some

thing almost like jealousy about it. He has taken himself into his own keeping, and this one act seems to foretell the time when he will take his whole life into his own hands, and leave her outside altogether. The time has past when she could hold him as a babe upon her bosom as she carried him down into Egypt. The time is prophesied already when he should go in his solitude up to the cross, and only leave his mother weeping at the foot. She is bidden to stand by and see her Son do his work and live his life, which thus far has been all of her shaping, in ways she cannot understand. No wonder that it is a clear, critical moment in her life. No wonder that her question still rings with the pain that she put into it. No wonder that when she went home, although he was still “subject unto her,” her life with her son was all changed, and she “kept all these sayings in her heart.”

I think that this question of the mother of Jesus reveals an experience of the human heart which is very common, which is most common in the best hearts and those who feel their responsibility the most. It is an experience which well deserves our study, and I ask you this morning to think about it with me in some of its examples. The Virgin Mary is the perpetual type of people who, intrusted with any great and sacred interest, identify their own lives with that interest and care for it conscientiously; but who, by-and-by, when the interest begins to manifest its own vitality and to shape its own methods, are filled with perplexity. They cannot keep the causes for which they labor under their own care. As his mother asked of Jesus, so they are always asking of the objects for which they live, “Why hast thou thus dealt with us?”. Such people are people who have realized respODsibility more than they have realized God. Just as Mary felt at the moment when she asked this question, that Jesus was her son more than that lu« was God’s Son, so there is a constant tendency among the most earnest and conscientious people, to feel that the causes for which they live and work are their causes, more than that they are God’s causes, and so to experience something which is almost like jealousy, when they see those causes pass beyond their power and fulfil themselves in larger ways than theirs. For such people, often the most devoted and faithful souls among us, it seems to me that there must be some help and light in this story of Jesus and his mother.

The first and simplest case of the experience which I want to speak of, is that which comes nearest to the circumstances of our story. It comes in every childhood. It comes whenever a boy grows up to the time at which he passes beyond the merely parental government which belonged to his earliest years. It comes with all assertion of individual character and purpose in a boy’s life. A boy has had his can r all identified with his home where he was cradled. What he was and did, he was and did as a member of that household. But by-and-by there comes some sudden outbreak of a personal energy. He shows some disposition, and attempts some teflk distinctively his own. It is a puzzling moment alike for the child and for the father. The child is perplexed with pleasure which is almost pain to find himself for the first time doing an act which is genuinely his own. The father is filled with a pain which yet has pride and pleasure in it to see his boy doing something original, something which he never bade him do, something which perhaps he could not do himself. The real understanding of that moment, both to child and father, depends upon one thing — upon whether they can see in it the larger truth that this child is not merely the son of his father, but also is the son of God. If they both understand that, then the child, as he undertakes his personal life, passes not into a looser, but into a stronger, responsibility. And the father is satisfied to see his first authority over his son grow less, because he cannot be jealous of God. It is a noble progress and expansion of life, when the first independent venture of a young man on a career of his own, is not the wilful claim of the prodigal: “Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me,” — but the reverent appeal of Jesus: “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Let this serve for an illustration. It is the scene which, recurring in every household, as a boy claims his own life, is constantly repeating the experience of the household of Nazareth. And now all responsible life, all life entrusted with the care of any of God’s causes, has this same sort of correspondence with the life of the mother of Jesus. There can be no higher specimen of responsibility than she exhibits. She is entrusted with the care of Him who is to be the Saviour of the world. And that responsibility she accepts en t i rely. She is willing to give up everything else in life, to be absorbed and worn out in the task of supreme privilege which. God has ii’iv. -n her. There comes no trouble or lack in the degree of her readiness for labor or for pain. But the quality of her self-sacrifice shows its defect else where. She is not able to see where the limits of her work must be. She is not able to stop short in her devout responsibility, when the task passes beyond her power, and her son begins to deal directly with his Father.

Compare with her, in the first place, that person with whom we are familiar in all the history of Christianity, whom we see about us constantly — the champion of the Faith, the man who counts it his work in Itfe to maintain and protect the purity of the belief in Christ. It is a noble task for a man to accept. It is filled with anxiety. The faith for which the man cares is beset with many dangers. It costs him sleepless nights and weary days. He incurs dislike; he excites hostility by his eager zeal. To all this he is fully equal. The danger of many a stout cham pion of truth com es quite at the o 1 1 1 r 1 1 1. There comes a time when God, as it were, takes back into His own keeping that faith over which lie has bidden His disciples to stand guard. The truth begins to show a vitality upon which the believer lias not counted. It puts itself into new forms. It develops new associations. No wonder that he is troubled. N wonder that, unless he is a large and thoughtful man, thoroughly reverent of truth as well as thoroughly devoted to the truths which he has held, he grudges truth in some way the larger freedom which it is claiming for itself, and almost opposes its development.

Take an example. A good man has for years counted himself a champion of the often denied and insulted justice of God. He has been ready to maintain it everywhere. Against all weak representations of God as a being all indulgence, he has asserted that God must punish wickedness. That truth he has supported, as he has conceived it, in its simplest, crudest form — physical, unending punishment. Suppose the day comes when that faith claims for itself a free and more spiritual meaning; when men’s souls become aware that in the world to come, as in this world, the punishment of sin must be bound up in sin itself; when not the agonies of hell, but the degradation of the moral nature, stands out as the dreadful thing. No wonder that at first, the surprised believer is almost dismayed. His faith, over which he has stood guard so faithfully, seems to be slipping away from him. His faith seems to be playing him false. He is bewildered, as Mary was when Jesus for the first time began to show his personal will and ways. But by-and-by the time came when she rejoiced in it, no doubt. “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” she ordered the servants at the marriage in Cana. By that time she had learned to trust her Son far out of her own sight, to look to his own self-develop-

26 Tlic A I others IVonder.

Tin-lit with perfect cniiiidriicr. Aii«l so tin- l><-]i and the champion oi’ln-lia’, conn -sin th«’c«uirsi- of time to rejoice when his belief outgrows him; when what lie lias to stand nard over is seen to be, not the cial form in which a dogma has been conceived, but tin- spirit to which knowledge can conic, and to which it must come always more spiritually and richly; not the truth, but truthfulness.

It does seem to me that this is what many a believer needs to learn to-day. His faith seems to be slipping away from him. Truths will not remain the definite and docile things they used to be. His doctrine opens into some deeper form. He turns to the doctrine he has held and says to it, uAYhv have you dealt thus with me?” “Why will you leave i And the answer is, “I must be about my Father’s business.” Truth is God’s child. Truth must be what God wills, not what the believer wills. It is a bless ed day for the believer when he learns this, and thenceforth only waits to see what new forms God will give his faith from year to year, and then is ready to follow it into whatever new regions God will send it forth to seek.

And this same truth applies to the care for the world’s reformation and improvement, which different kinds of good men have; There are some men undertaking to reform the world who want to keep the whole plan in their own hands and never have ‘. orking outgo their wisdom. There are other reformers who believe themselves to be working in a great system which is far too large for them to comprehend, to which they can only give a helping touch at one point where it comes near their lives. The first kind of reformer believes that he understands it all, knows just how evil is to be eradicated, just how good is to be aroused and the world saved. The other reformer does not profess to know any thing except that God is over all and that under God he has the privilege of helping this cause or that cause of righteousness in some special time of need, and at some special point which he can touch. The first is the reformer with a theory. The second is a reformer with a devotion.

And it is evident what will be the different effect on these two men, if, as so often happens, the progress of humanity seems to declare a will of its own, does not advance as we expected it to advance, lags where we look for it to hasten, or leaps to some great attainment where we expected it to proceed by slow degrees. The theoretical reformer, who thinks him self a master of human progress, and has imagined that he understood it all, is entirely lost as he sees the reform which he has thought could only come to pass in one way, attaining its accomplishment in another, and going on its way far off’ in some new direction, leaving him behind. The devout reformer, who has considered himself the servant of human good, is glad enough to see that human good is far larger than he can understand, and is content if he can lend his little skill to some corner of its many wants, and be carried on with it, working for it, to unknown results.

There are always po<,j,l«. who are uneasy it’luml times improve by other ways than they suggested. Tin-re are men enough in our land to-day who cannot be totally glad that slavery is alx.lishrd, U-<-aus«- its abolition did not come about by their plan. There are men in the Church who begrudge the work she does, if it is not done by their own school of church men. What is the trouble with all these people? Is it not simple enough? They have the care of some one of God’s children, some one of the causes which are born of Him, and which He loves, but they treat it as if it were not God’s child, but only theirs. They are afraid if they see it growing strong in ways which they do not understand. When it dawns upon such a man that behind all the care which he has for any of the great interests of righteousness and the use which God is making of him in its behalf, God himself is holding that interest in the hollow of His hand, and with His infinite wisdom is preparing for it ways of success which His servant cannot begin to know, how calm and confident the servant’s care for that good work must grow; how ready he must be to see the methods of the reform which he desires change utterly before his eyes, to see it taken utterly out of his hands and yet work on for it with all his might and soul. Here is the salvation of honest partisanship. You believe that only your political party can save the country. But if you believe that the salvation of the country is a care of God, you will stand ever ready to help whatever new party God may seem to entrust with one period of that ever nnfinished work. You and I believe that our Church has a great work to do for Christ’s Gospel in our country, but if we believe that Christ’s gospel is something which is very near to the heart of God, we cannot possibly limit our sympathy to what our Church is doing. Even if our Church fails of its duty, we cannot possibly feel as if the gospel had failed. We shall have to rejoice, even while we work on with her, that God has other ways to do the work in which she does her part so feebly.

These cases are no doubt too general; they do not touch us very closely. Let us try to come nearer home. I think that the same principle applies to every work which any one of us tries to do for any of his brethren. I know that in this congregation there must be many who are anxious for the life of some one whom they love. A certain responsibility lies upon you for some brother’s life. Somebody seems to have been given to you to care for. You did not seek the care. But here is some one who, because there is no one else to care for him and see that he goes right, has grown to be your care. That responsibility is no light one, you well know. It presses on you. You are anxious under it. Can our story help you? Surely it can. You say, “How? Is there not an un likeness at the very outset of the story? Was not this one over whom the Virgin Mary watched, the Son of God?” But tell me: is not the man whom you are anxious for, the brother who is in the midst of his temptation, the friend who is out of work and growing idle, the beggar whom you

3O The Mother’s Wonder.

are trying to reform out of his drunkenness, is noteach of these too a son of God? And is it not tnu-, and must it not ent«-r into the very centre of your care for them, that they are under God’s care just as truly as they are under your care; and that, while (iod uses you for their development, it is perfectly possible, it is every way to be expected, that He will develop them by means and in directions of which you never would have dreamed?

I think that it is hopeless for any man to undertake to render high help to another man’s life who is not constantly aware of this. Mary learned two things about her Son that day in the temple, things which she had known before, but which became perfectly and permanently clear to her there. One was, that his life was mysteriously larger than her own. The other was, that God was over and behind her, caring for that life for which she had been caring. The largeness and mystery of her Son’s life and the fatherhood of God to him, those two things she learned there, and thenceforth they were part of lu-r life always. She never can have forgotten them again. They must have made all the future service that she rendered to him at once more faithful and more calm and more sacred. And my dear friend, you too must learn these truths about the life of any man whom you a.re trying to help, any man who seems to be committed to you by God, or you cannot really help him as he needs. You must know the mystery of his life and his sonship to God.

Ah, how God sometimes teaches us those things about some one whom we are trying to guide and aid. We have undertaken our task very flippantly and narrowly. “Well, this is my man,” we say, “I do not see who else can help him, and so I will. I will patronize him. I understand him; I see what is to be made out of him; I will make him this, and this,” — laying some fine plan down in our mind. “This is what he shall be,” and so you take your scholar into your school; your companion into your company; what you call your friend into what you call your friendship. The time must come, if you are ever really going to be of deepest use to that man, when, out of something which he says or does, these two truths come to you about him, that he is larger in his nature, more mysterious than you can grasp, and that he is the son of God, led by his Father, over and above your care.

We talk about men’s neglect of one another’s lives, and certainly there is enough of it. They go their way saying of each other, in some utterance of their indifference, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We recognize how terrible it is because we see that, as of old, he who scornfully disowned his brother’s care, really was his brother’s murderer, so always he who thinks he has no duty of helping other men, certainly hinders them and does them harm. But beside all the pain at seeing how men disown the care of their fellows, there is another pain which is often yet more painful as we see how men who do attempt to help their brethren, help them all wrong, with such ignorant and clumsy hands that they do them more harm than good. MeddlesomeneaB, arrogance, fooliBh indulgence, wanton severity, wooden insistence upon a way of goodness which (.io<l never meant for the man whom you arc trying to make good, opposition to good impulses because they happen to be in other lines than yours, fussiness, suspicion, jealousy, all of these evils conn- in, ami others with them, to make sometimes worse than worthless the most sincere desire of some good man to help and guide his neighbor. Blind leading the blind everywhere! What, it seems to me, all these good people need, is this: the larger view of the life that they are anxious for. There is a mystery about this man which I cannot fathom. And this man is a child of God. You say, “I might feel that about, some inspired child whom I was privileged to teach. How can I feel it about this poor sot, whom I am trying to keep out of the grog-shop; or this poor trifler and lounger whom I want to bring to church; or this poor creature with the shattered nerves whom I must watch lest he should throw himself into the fire? Can I count his life mysterious, count him a child of God?” Unless you can, you cannot help him with any truly deep help. You may keep him unscorched and presentable, but the shattered, broken, wasted life at the centre, wkere its real exhaustion lies, will get no reinforcement from the man ho has no reverence for it and no sense of God’s love for it. The moment that Moses forgot that the people he was leading were God’s people, and smote the rock, crying, “Hear, 0 Israel, must I bring you water from this rock?” that moment his highest help to them was gone. He could give them water still, bat the water which he gave as if it were his gift, and not God’s, was an insult both to them and to God; and from that day his death began.

And if we ask what will be the characteristics of the ministry of any man. who, while he renders help to other men, feels these truths deeply about the men to whom he ministers, the answer will be clear. It will have the qualities which we can easily imagine to have been in the treatment of the child Jesus by His mother after her experience in the Temple. It will consist in general inspiration more than in special direction; and it will be more occupied in removing obstacles to growth than in dictating the forms and directions in which growth shall grow. The best advisers, helpers, friends, always are those not who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find what our own form of right action is. And always the best thing you can do for any brother, I am more and more convinced, is to try to keep him from being a bad man, and so give God a chance to make him a good man in whatever way He may choose. This takes away the superior and patronizing tone which is the blight of many a man’s most sincere desire to be useful. This leaves the humblest free to help the highest. The mouse may gnaw the lion’s net, but he does not ask the

freed lion to crawl into the wall with him and live a mouse’s life. So you may help a strong man to shake off his vice, but when lie is at liberty, leave him to God to learn what’ life God made him fur, and be thankful if it is something a great deal larger and higher than your own.

There are small men to whom all this would be depressing. They do not want to do anything for other men unless they can take the whole work into their own hands and make it wholly theirs. For a larger man it is a great deal nobler and more ennobling to work with God and on a material of which God has shown to him the mystery. A weak He brew mother, with a poor stupid boy who never left the company with any true impulsive life to seek the God whom he belonged to, may well have pitied Mary, and thought her unhappy in her wilful child. But “Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” She learned that it was nobler to bring her boy to God and see him take God for his Father, than it was to keep him to herself. And so you and I come to understand that the type of the truest relationship between man and man is not the Romish confessional, the spiritual di rectorship where one man gives his life into another’s hands, but is the frank friendship of generous men, wherein each helps the other, but is always glad to know that he is really only helping God to help him; and so each always rejoices to see the other, under God, outgo himself.

But we must not stop here. There is a yet deeper and closer care laid upon a man than his care for his brother, and that is the care of himself, of his own soul. And there too the truth applies which we have won out of our story of Jesus and his mother. There too it is true that a man cannot execute his responsibility aright unless in that for which he is responsible he sees something mysterious, and a child of God.

A man’s care for himself! How strange it is! How a man seems to separate his life; to stand off, as it were, and gaze at his own life with criticism and anxiety. It is the commonest of all experiences with all thoughtful people. “Know thyself,” says the old proverb; as if the knower and the known were genuinely two, distinct from one another. “Keep thy heart with diligence,” says Scripture, as if the heart and the heart-keeper were separate. The will and wisdom stand guard over the conscience and the character.

A man who is really thoughtful, who has risen to the capacity of such self-care, praises himself, and blames himself, with a more even-handed justice be cause with a more intimate and conscientious knowledge, than that with which he judges of the lives of other men. He is to himself like something outside of himself, with whose conditions nevertheless all his own fortunes are inextricably bound up. Therefore he lays out plans for his own treatment. He says: “I will make myself this or that.” He says, “I will bring myself to my best in this or that way.” And then, as he tries to carry out his plans, he becomes aware that on this self of his which he considered so entirely his own, in his own power, some other force besides his own is working. He finds himself the subject of some other will and wisdom, Rome other education than his own. His plans for his own life are overruled and interfered with, lie meant to educate his self by self-indulgence; this other force, below his own, sweeps his self off into distress and deprivation. He meant to live in self-complacency; the deeper force plunges him into mortification and shame. It is as if the wind thought that it was ruling the waves which it tossed to and fro, but gradually became aware of the tide which underneath was heaving the great ocean on whose surface only the wind spent its force.

Is this a true picture of human life as the thought ful man comes to know it? I think it is. Who is there of us that is not aware that his soul has had two educations? Sometimes the two have been in opposition; sometimes they have overlapped; some times they have wholly coincided? but always the two have been two. Our own government of our selves is most evident, is the one which we an- most aware of, so that sometimes for a few moincni forget that there is any other; but very soon our plans for ourselves are so turned and altered and hindered that we cannot ignore the other greater, deeper f« We meant to do that, and look! we have been led on to this. We meant to be this, and lo! we are ( hat. We never meant to believe this, and lo, we hold it with all our hearts. What does it mean? It is the lasting discovery, the discovery which each thoughtful man makes for himself with almost as much surprise as if no other man had ever made it for himself before, that this soul, for which he is responsible, is not his soul only, but is God’s soul too. The revelation which came of old to the Virgin Mother about her child — Not your child only, but God’s child too; yours, genuinely, really yours, but behind yours, and over yours, God’s.

That is the great revelation about life. When it comes, everything about one’s self-culture is altered. Every anticipation and thought of living changes its color. It comes sometimes early, and sometimes late in life. Sometimes it is the flush and glow which fills childhood with dewy hope and beauty. Sometimes it is the peace which gathers about old age and makes it happy. Whenever it comes it makes life new. See what the changes are which it must bring. First it makes anything like a bewildering surprise impossible. When I have once taken it into my account that God has his plans for my soul’s culture, that these plans of His outgo and supersede any plans for it which I can make, then any new turn that comes is explicable to me, and, though I may not have anticipated it all, I am not overwhelmed, nor disturbed, nor dismayed by it. I find a new conviction growing in my soul, another view of life, another kind of faith. It is not what I had intended. I had determined that as long as I lived I would believe something very different from this which I now feel rising and taking possession of me. It seems at first as if my soul had been disloyal to me, and had turned its back faithlessly upon my teaching. I appeal to it, and say: “Soul, why hast thou thus dealt with i; And it answers back to me: “Wist you not, that 1 must be about my Father’s business? Did you not know that I was God’s soul as well as your soul? This is something which He has taught me.”

That is the real meaning, my dear friends, of many a case in which men say, “I do not know how I came to believe this truth. I never sought it. I never meant to believe it. I always said I never would believe it. But the belief in it has come about in spite of myself.” It was the over-fatherhood of God. It was God claiming His own soul. Let a man see this, and he welcomes the convictions that have come to his soul thus direct from God, even more cordially than those which he has sought out and won with deliberate toil. What he has believed in spite of him self he believes even more strongly than what he has struggled to believe. He cannot be jealous of what God does for his soul. He is like a servant taking care of a child, with the father of the child standing behind and watching and making plans with a wis dom which the servant rejoices to know is wiser than his. Oh, if there were no higher guidance than what we can give to our own lives! Oh, if our souls never outstripped the plans which we make for them! Oh, if we never came to more truth than we are brave enough and wise enough to seek!

There are two different conditions in which a man receives without bewildering surprise the changes which come to him in life. One is the condition of the man who believes in no government of life at all. The other is the condition of the man who thoroughly believes that God is governing his life. To both of these men mystery is not merely conceivable; it is inevitable. To one it is the vague, dreary mystery of chance. To the other it is the rich, gracious mystery of loving care. To one it is the mystery of accident, the most awful and demoralizing atmosphere for a man to live in. To the other it is the mystery of personal life, which is the noblest end of thought which man can reach on any side. Neither of these men can be surprised. One of them cries, “It is an other accident!” The other cries, “It is my father!” when any most unlooked-for thing occurs. Between the two there stands the man with his own tight self-made plan of living which he looks to see fulfilled, denying both mysteries, refusing to believe in accident and yet ignoring God. He is the man whose life is all battered and buffeted with surprises. He is like a man who sails the ocean and refuses to be lieve in tides. No wonder that after a long and dreary voyage, he drags at last a broken and wrecked life up on a beach which he never dreamed of when he started.

The other consequence of the great revelation of life, the revelation that the soul for which we care is God’s soul, for which He is caring too, will be that the true man will have one great purpose in living, and only one. He will try to come to harmony with God, to perfect understanding of what God wants and is trying to do. Let me not be trying to make one thing out of this soul of mine -while lie is trying to make entirely another! Once more return to thu story which has given us our suggestions for to-day. As Mary went back with her son, realizing out of his own mouth, that he was not only her son, but God’s; as she settled down with him to their Nazareth life again, must not one single strong question h;ive been upon her heart, “What does God want this Son of His to be? 0, let me find that out, that 1 may work with Him.” And as you go into the house where you are to train your soul, realizing, through some revelation that has come to it, that it is God’s soul as well as yours, one strong and single question must be pressing on you too. ‘* What does God want this soul of mine to be? 0, let me find that out that I may work with Him.” And how can you find that out? Only by finding Him out. Only by understanding what He is, can you understand what He wants you to do. And understanding comes by love. And love to God comes by faith in Jesus Christ. See then, what is the divine progress of self-culture. You let Christ give you his blessings. Through gratitude to Him you come to the love of God. By loving God you understand God. By understanding God you come to see what He wants you to be, and so you are ready to work with Him for your own soul. From the first touch of Christ’s hand in blessing, on to the eternal work of laboring with God for our own sanctification, that is the progress of the Christian life.

The Son of Mary was a revelation to the mother in whose care He lived. So a man’s soul, his spirit ual nature which is intrusted to his care, is a perpetual revelation to him. If you can only know that your soul is God’s child, that He is caring for it and training it, then it may become to you the source of deep divine communications. God will speak to you through your own mysterious life. He will show you his wisdom and goodness, not in the heaven above you, but in the soul within you. He will make you His fellow-worker in that which is the most di vine work of His of which we can have any know ledge, the training and perfecting of a soul. That is the privilege of every man who knows, and finds his life and joy in knowing, that the soul which lives within him, the soul which he calls his soul, is the child of God.